bent his tall frame over the front of his truck to inspect the damage as if nothing had happened. Nu was now incensed, and while Emma rushed to Maxon’s mother to help her to her feet, Nu stomped her small sharp self over the gravel road to Mr. Mann and poked him firmly in the backside with her foot.
“Hey you, piece of shit,” she said. “You piece of shit, you treat your wife this way? What kind of man are you?”
“Go to hell,” he growled, taking his time examining his fender. She lifted her foot again, balancing impeccably on one tiny foot in the road. She gave him another sharp poke and growled back. He slowly righted himself, pulling himself up to his full height. “Who the fuck are you anyway, some Mexican?”
Mrs. Mann was crying into Emma’s shoulder, blood spouting from a split in her lip, her bulbous nose running freely, small eyes red and apologetic.
“I ain’t sorry for him,” she declared angrily. “He’s too big for this county? No he ain’t. He thinks he is, but he ain’t.”
Nu’s face registered nothing but serenity as she laid a roundhouse kick on Mann’s knee, just behind the joint. He was shocked, and fell like a tree gnawed off by beavers, right into the road.
“Shit!” he yelled. “Holy shit, the Mexican! Get her, Laney!” Nu followed her roundhouse with a deft kick to the sternum, knocking the wind out of him. He grabbed his throat, coughing, his eyes bugging out.
“You kilt him! You kilt him! Aoww!” keened Mrs. Mann, sobbing anew.
Emma, mopping up Mrs. Mann’s face with the flowered dress, quickly interrupted. Ignoring his rolling eyes and the fact that he was sitting in the middle of the road, she addressed him politely: “Mr. Mann, I believe you need a tow truck. Can I take your wife into town to make the arrangements? I don’t mind. Then I can bring her and Maxon back to your house at your convenience. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Yeah,” Ma Mann joined in with enthusiasm, “Miz Butcher’ll take me to town, and I’ll send Pete back for y’uns with a winch.”
Mann glowered at them from the road where he sat, then sighed deeply, defeated. “All right,” he grunted. “I’ll walk home, it’s only ’bout a mile. Pete can find the damn truck. We wuz just comin’ to see what y’uns had done with that boy.”
“You not gonna leave that truck here half in, half out of the road,” said Nu indignantly. “You stay here, direct traffic, you big booby.” Then she stepped back into the car daintily and shut the door. “You children just be quiet back there,” she told them unnecessarily, smoothing her black braids and patting down her demure collar. “Everything under control.”
Mrs. Mann, emboldened by this display of female power, marched over to her husband and stuck her grubby, sweaty palm out firmly. “Now I need money for town,” she said, her mouth turned down like a toddler’s.
“How much,” he growled, grubbing in his pocket.
“I want much dollars,” she said truculently. “I’m going to town.”
Later, when they were driving, she was quiet, sandwiched between Emma and Nu. Behind them, the children were still quiet. There was really nothing to say. But Sunny had seen something new, something she had never seen before. In the front seat, here was the sniffling and bubbling Mrs. Mann, fatly rumpled and pressed between the cool and collected Emma Butcher and her small terrible Nu. They came to the end of the dirt road, hit the two- lane highway, and accelerated.
Sunny said to Maxon, clearly, “Does your dad hit you like that?”
Maxon’s mother threw one hammy arm over the back of the seat and said, “No, he never done ’at. He never would done ’at, neither. Paul loves his kids. He’s a bad husband to me, but he loves on his kids with the best of ’em.”
Maxon regarded Sunny coldly. He wouldn’t say anything. She knew, looking at him, that this was not the truth. She knew what her mother knew when she went over to that house for the first time, that dropping Maxon back into that was dropping him into poison. And as capricious as she sometimes felt, and as many times as she thought her mother was spending too much time on Maxon, helping him learn about singing and piano, and all the signs and charts she made for him, and the way she explained things again and again, when Maxon wasn’t even listening, when Maxon wasn’t even looking, and the way they had to stop in the middle of stories again and again to figure out why, how does this person feel, why did this person do that. She knew, even though she was only eight, that it was worth it.
And Emma knew, in the front seat, next to this mountain of blubbering guilt and all her victimization, that the child back there, the child back there in the backseat with her child, was hers to save. That she could save him, but that he was forever damaged. And where she had felt before sort of missionary about it, sort of selfless and helpful, as a crusader, as a nun, she now felt protective for Sunny. Who was she to bring this awfulness into her child’s life? She hoped she had not done too much. She hoped it could be, in some way, undone. And yet, when she looked in the rearview mirror and the way the children were wound around each other, she saw that she might now be too late. Maxon was different. Sunny was different. They were different together. And whatever bad, messed-up thing was true down in him and down in her, it would be hard to separate them.
IN THE ROOM, IN the middle of the hospital, there was a life struggling to stay alive, trying to stick around and fix it. Everything that had been allowed to happen, and everything that had not yet happened, could all be rectified, could all be set straight. In the womb, in the middle of Sunny, there was a life struggling to come alive, struggling to make its way blinking out into the world. In its life, there had yet been no mistakes. There had been no love, no sadness, no peace, no fear. There had only been sustenance, and a shallow range of experiences. Yet this life, insentient, wanted only to push on to the next place, out of the darkness, on to the next thing, to the broader range. One hung on, one pushed forward. As one pushed forward the other was pushed forward as well. It was a death and a life happening, all at the same long time.
18
Sunny was watching the NASA channel and missing Maxon. All they ever had on the TV when he was home was cycling or the stock market. He didn’t care about entertainment. It was hard not to be distracted and frantic, when he was not around. She hoped that in the last five years of her life with him, she had not ruined their marriage and their love together. Once she had only been for him, had only been busy with loving him. She had laid herself up next to his full, knobby length, and had been equal to it, perfectly equal. They were like a graft, like a new creation, from long association and also perfect love together.
When she got pregnant for the first time, Sunny was afraid she had to become something else. When you become a mother, how can you be another thing at the same time? When you become an orphan, how can you be anything other than that? She worried now that everything she became had just squeezed the love out, until she might only sort of love him, only used to love him. Maybe she forgot how to fill up the rest of it, because it’s full of other things—orphan-to-be, mother. Maybe you can’t truly wrap your flesh around another person, after there’s been a baby inside you. Maybe your parentless sorrow puts you in a box with those who have the same sorrow. Her mother was dying. She wanted Maxon, the old Maxon, the way it used to be. And yet she knew that he had always been the old Maxon. It was she who had changed. Yet everything else she had tried to become was stupid and pointless.
At lunchtime, Sunny received an e-mail reminding her that the annual neighborhood craft show, which she had helped to organize, would be happening later on in the afternoon. The e-mail subject header was “Don’t Forget!” The last line in the e-mail promised mimosas. Sunny frowned. Would she still be going to the neighborhood craft show? What if her mother died right in the middle of it, and she had to run out to the hospital? What if Maxon fell out of the sky and she had to go catch him? What if Bubber had a breakthrough, started reciting prime numbers? She would want to video that. What if she got a huge contraction and spewed amniotic fluid all over the wide-plank oak-finish farmhouse floor of the party host? Sunny smoothed her dress down over a twisting, kicking baby in her belly. What if everyone looked at her and said, “Why are you here?” Then the phone rang. It was Rache calling her to find out if she was still going.
“Are you still going?” asked Rache.
“Well, are bald people allowed?” Sunny asked.
